In summary
Infrastructure issues at California’s public universities are hindering students and faculty’s ability to learn and work on campus. Lawmakers and system leaders are hoping more state support can help them bring down the $17 billion price tag to fix their academic buildings.
Across California’s public university systems, students, faculty and staff are learning and working in aging academic buildings where air conditioning, roofs, plumbing and electrical systems are either deteriorating or not functional. Every year, maintenance costs for University of California and California State University campuses total a combined $1.5 billion.
But those repairs don’t always get made. The unpredictable nature of the state’s budget means there isn’t always enough money to make all the necessary fixes. State revenue has been sporadic, with hundreds of millions some years and no money in others. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed 2025-26 budget does not include any money for repairs, known as deferred maintenance, or other infrastructure projects.
Absent a long-term funding plan, the deferred maintenance backlog has grown to an estimated $9.1 billion for the University of California and $8.3 billion for Cal State University as of the 2023-24 school year, driven by aging buildings and increasing costs for labor and parts.
Given the size of the backlog, in 2023 the state Legislature’s budget advisory office urged lawmakers and system leaders to create a long-term funding solution for maintenance. Without those fixes, students and employees have had to endure extreme indoor heat, electrical and plumbing problems, and failing, outdated roofs.
State funding has been sporadic
The state’s public university systems are some of the largest in the nation, both in terms of enrollment and physical size. The UC operates 63 million square feet of academic space across 10 campuses and the Cal State system spans 43 million square feet across 23 campuses. Large physical systems come with large price tags to maintain them, especially as campus infrastructure ages. A majority of both systems’ buildings are over 30 years old, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.
Each year the UC and Cal State systems provide the Legislature with a five-year plan of proposed building improvement projects with cost estimates. This year, one proposed project includes replacing Santa Clara Hall at Sacramento State. Built in the 1960s, the building houses the engineering laboratory and has HVAC, electrical and telecommunications infrastructure that have “exceeded their useful life,” according to the California State University’s five-year plan.
While both university systems have robust tracking to quantify the size and cost of their maintenance backlogs, it’s harder to track the amount they spend on deferred maintenance projects. That’s because a building project, like Santa Clara Hall, may include replacement of old or faulty components in addition to other improvements or renovations, like making a building safer during an earthquake. What also complicates matters is the various sources of funding the systems tap to pay for expensive projects.
At the campus level, administrators can choose to use a portion of their base budget or reserves saved from previous budget allocations to fund repairs to academic buildings, though some campuses spend “little, if any, ongoing funds” on such replacements, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.
In 2013 and 2014, respectively, state legislation granted the UC and CSU systems the ability to issue their own bonds to finance large projects, like entire building renovations or replacements. The systems then pay back the debt from those bonds using their general budget allocation. From 2013 to 2023, the UC financed about $1.1 billion in projects using university issued bonds and Cal State financed roughly $1.8 billion in projects through its own bonds from 2014 to 2023, according to data reviewed by the Legislative Analyst’s Office. In addition to financing, both UC and Cal State can use revenue from system investments to pay for building improvements.
But the amount that the campuses and systems have been spending on replacements has not kept pace with the growth of the maintenance backlog. “To have the ongoing funding, to any degree, any amount — the restoration of that would be a significant plus towards working down this inventory,” said Ron Kalich, the director of Facilities and Asset Management for UC.
State support has been sporadic in recent years, largely influenced by the overall state budget conditions. Since 2015, the state has provided $689 million to UC and $784 million to Cal State to fund deferred maintenance projects in addition to making seismic safety and energy efficiency updates. Nearly half of that money came from the 2021-22 budget. That year each system received $325 million. Other years have been more lean. Newsom’s proposed 2025-26 budget has no allocation for deferred maintenance, nor was there any this year or last year.
“I do not stay in that class. I’m like, ‘I will do the homework, but I’m gonna go home.’”
Frederick Lisitsa, Fresno state student
“We have not seen any designated facility deferred maintenance related funding from the state for a few years now, which has exacerbated critical issues as our campus continues to age,” said Mark Zakhour, Cal State Long Beach associate vice president of the building services division.
The Legislative Analyst’s Office recommends the Legislature work with UC and Cal State to develop a plan to provide ongoing funds for future deferred maintenance repairs based on the size of each system’s needs. In the meantime, the Legislature is reviewing a newly introduced bill to put a bond before voters in 2026 that would fund repairs for both systems.
Students and faculty await fixes across the state
In the meantime, students and faculty are in buildings with broken or dilapidated equipment. At Fresno State around 62% of campus buildings are over 60 years old, according to Lisa Bell, Fresno State’s public information officer. Faith Van Hoven, a fourth-year philosophy major, says the air conditioning is so outdated it can’t keep up with the heat. She remembers sitting down during her ethics in criminal justice course on a day when the temperature reached triple digits. She looked up at the ceiling fan as it rotated but felt no reprieve.
“When it gets to be 110 [degrees] here, it can be really, really hot, and there’s not always accommodations that are made for students and for the faculty,” Van Hoven said.
She’s tried to push through the heat with a small, personal fan that does little to cool the air. Students like Frederick Lisitsa, a fourth-year double major in philosophy and psychology at Fresno State, choose to avoid the indoor heat altogether.
“I do not stay in that class. I’m like, ‘I will do the homework, but I’m gonna go home,’” he said.
Rats, heat and cold have kept Carolynn Patten, a professor of neurobiology at the UC Davis School of Medicine, and her team from safely conducting research with recovering stroke patients. Her lab is housed within the 86-year-old Hickey Gymnasium building.
“The building is so old and the HVAC system is so decrepit that without exaggeration, in the winter, it will get so cold that we will be working indoors in outdoor jackets, hats, gloves,” Patten said.
During hotter weather, extreme indoor heat isn’t just uncomfortable for her students and research participants. It affects her temperature-sensitive research equipment. “The temperatures in the room get to a point that they’re really out of the operating range for my equipment. And so now I have $2 million of equipment in there that is being compromised just because we can’t create the right environment,” Patten said.
Rats have also chewed the cables that power her equipment, leading her to cancel experiments and halt her research. Patten explained that due to the constant delays, her research partner said he will stop payments because he’s not getting timely data.
“The reason we haven’t delivered data is we couldn’t do experiments,” said Patten. “I will, in no way, do anything that will compromise patient safety. It wasn’t safe to do experiments because the rats had damaged their equipment, and now it’s going to have an impact on funding my research.”
How maintenance backlogs grow on campus
UC officials say ignoring small fixes can lead to costly repairs down the road. “If you don’t do the proper preventive maintenance, you shorten the life cycle of these things, so then they become deferred maintenance,” said Clint Lord, associate vice chancellor of facilities at UC Davis.
That’s part of the reason why money is allocated for operations and maintenance in the budget for any new building project. Money is allocated per square feet to pay for ongoing upkeep of the building. But the cost to eventually replace building components is not included in those building budgets, which is part of the reason why backlogs have grown so large. When something needs replacing every couple of decades there’s no pot of money set aside specifically to pay the replacement costs.
“When the state started funding academic facilities, they missed one key component,” said Shawn Holland, chief of Facilities Operations at Cal State. “What they never considered was, ‘What does it cost to renew that building 20 years later?’”
That’s not the case for all buildings on campus, though. Buildings that generate revenue, like parking structures or dormitories, do have money allocated by square footage to pay for forecasted replacement costs over time. Making that process uniform with academic buildings is one way the state can begin budgeting for the costs of academic buildings that will need new equipment or upkeep in the future, Holland said.
That change wouldn’t impact the current backlog, however. Campuses leaving deferred maintenance projects unfixed can also put a university’s mission in jeopardy, said Matt Gudorf, assistant vice chancellor of facilities at UC Irvine. Emergencies caused by infrastructure failure can displace students, faculty and staff and strain campus operating budgets.
“Now we are impacting people’s ability to go to class, to go to their office, to do research,” Gudorf said. “It not only costs facilities more money, but you’re disrupting the whole mission of the university, and that’s a huge issue.”
Leaving items on the backlog can also make the replacement more expensive as inflation drives up pricing for parts and workers who are qualified to make updates. Inflation has been “the biggest driver in cost increases” of the deferred maintenance backlog at UC, according to Kalich.
Exploring alternative funding
In 2023, the Legislative Analyst’s Office proposed that the university systems and lawmakers develop a long-term funding model that would provide universities an ongoing percentage of the value of their deferred maintenance backlog to help bring it down over time. University officials and legislators haven’t done that though lawmakers are looking at ways to increase funding outside of the systems’ budget allocations.
Assemblymember David Alvarez, a Democrat from Chula Vista whose district includes San Diego State University, introduced AB 48 to put a bond measure on the 2026 ballot to raise billions of dollars for UC and Cal State to address their growing maintenance backlogs. The bill doesn’t have a dollar amount yet, said Alvarez, who sits on the Assembly Education committee.
“We have to go back and really explain to the voters why this [bond] is important and why we should invest in higher education facilities,” Alvarez said.
The last time UC and Cal State received money from a statewide bond initiative was in 2006, when voters approved $3.1 billion for community colleges, UC and Cal State campuses to address infrastructure needs.
In 2020, voters rejected Proposition 13, the largest school bond proposal in state history, which would have provided the UC and Cal State $2 billion each to fund infrastructure projects and repairs in addition to $11 billion for K-12 schools and the California community colleges.
Lawmakers included UC and Cal State in an early version of Proposition 2, a school bond measure approved last November, but the university systems were eventually left out to limit the amount of bond money voters were asked to approve. At the UC, where total capital needs are expected to grow to $30.7 billion by 2030, system leaders said they were disappointed to be left off the state bond despite 18 months of lobbying the Legislature.
“Going forward, UC will be exploring other options to address our construction, renewal and deferred maintenance needs,” wrote UC spokesperson Heather Hanson via email.
Cal State trustee Jack McGrory said being left out of the bond was “upside down” at a board meeting in September and urged the board to figure out a plan to secure desperately needed state funding. The deferred maintenance backlog at Cal State is expected to increase by $397 million annually due to inflation and aging facilities, according to Steve Relyea, Cal State’s executive vice chancellor and chief financial officer.
“We’ve got to figure out some different strategy, some alternative for this, because our buildings are in really bad shape,” McGrory said.
Mercy Sosa and Victoria Mejicanos are fellows with the College Journalism Network, a collaboration between CalMatters and student journalists from across California. CalMatters higher education coverage is supported by a grant from the College Futures Foundation.